


woman king, bloodshot eye

by neutrophilic



Category: The Silmarillion and other histories of Middle-Earth - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: Ambiguous Relationships, Dreamsharing, F/M, Gen, Minor canonical character death, man's eternal quest to go west, other characters make cameos, the Haladin
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-07
Updated: 2020-11-07
Packaged: 2021-03-08 21:34:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,370
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27183208
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/neutrophilic/pseuds/neutrophilic
Summary: Haleth had set her people on their current course with two twinned imperatives: to go west and to stay on the road. Neither was easy.Or, the legends around Nan Dungortheb's dangers are incomplete and the threats lurking in slumber may be more dangerous than those the Haladin face during the day.
Relationships: Caranthir | Morifinwë/Haleth of the Haladin
Comments: 8
Kudos: 17
Collections: Trick or Treat Exchange 2020





	woman king, bloodshot eye

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Isilloth](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Isilloth/gifts).



> I hope you enjoy this, Isilloth! When I went back to the Silm to reread all of the parts about Haleth, I got stuck on the line "That land was even then not yet so evil as it after became, but it was no road for mortal Men to take without aid, and Haleth only brought her people through it with hardship and loss, constraining them to go forward by the strength of her will" and I couldn't help but to imagine what some of those hardships might have been.
> 
> Title is from Woman King by Iron & Wine.

Haleth had set her people on their current course with two twinned imperatives: to go west and to stay on the road. Neither was easy. Nan Dungortheb had been a fairytale—a shadowy, spidery place to the west of Thargelion and thereby convenient to menace disobedient children with—but the threat of lurking Orcs ready to snatch lost children and grind their bones into flour had been a much more present danger. Fear of the valley hadn’t set into her marrow in quite the same way. Haleth, along with the rest of the Haladin, had been wrong to so discount it.

In Estolad, once it had become clear that it could never be a home for the Haladin, only a place to wait out the worst of the winter; they had sought counsel from the other Men there on how best to go west. Via the south, they’d said with one voice, there’s a hard road, but a manageable one with Elven help. But when asked if it were possible to travel it along without ensnaring the Haladin in a net of fealty to those distant lords, everyone had a different way to talk around the fact that the answer was no. And so, it had been decided to go instead via Nan Dungortheb and risk the path between the Mountains of Terror and the Girdle of Melian.

The decision had been made communally, in a series of debates held in a great clearing, as far as could be managed from the other people of Estolad. Should they stay and become subsumed by the much larger other Peoples, unable to set up homesteads as they wished, and let their language, their traditions, and their separate identity melt away? Or should they depart as the Haladin to an uncertain fate by uncertain roads? Haleth had spoken little at those meetings; her heart filled with the desire to leave, but it had not been her place to compel others along with her.

However, at the conclusion, her throat had been thick with woodsmoke and exhaustion and the need to shout her few words so they’d fill every single corner of the grove. So when she’d announced that they were leaving, that raspiness had been taken as proof from the other Men that she’d harangued the rest of her people into submission and that she’d set herself up as Lady Haleth. The Haladin had never sought to have a permanent ruler before, content to govern themselves in times of peace, and she did not want to change that. What they’d thought hadn’t mattered because the Haladin were leaving, but those assumptions were exactly why it had been so critical to leave. If Haladin had wished instead, they could remain in Estolad—and a few did—or return to Thargelion and see if Lord Caranthir’s offer of northern lands was still available.

But still, the fact that the choice was not hers alone did not help with the guilt. The Haladin did not want leaders in times of peace, but what they were attempting was not peaceful, and so she’d been selected again to lead them west. With every death, every hardship, the mantle of leadership weighed on her as strongly as if she’d been solely responsible. They’d known the road would be hard and hazardous. They’d known that there was a risk not all of their number would make it across safely. But they had not known it would be quite so terrible.

Very little in Nan Dungortheb felt properly real. Even at noon, the sun’s light was anemic and shone oddly, hiding rather than revealing the innumerable spider webs ready to catch at an insufficiently prepared traveller. Food was scarce and strange. There were two classes of game to be found: spiders that had always been spiders and spiders that might have something else once. The latter, if available and thoroughly checked for secret venom sacs, could be eaten. Along the southern boundary of the path, fruiting bushes and trees dotted the way, bearing mulberries the size of Haleth’s palm, vibrantly sour orange stone fruits that stained everybody’s teeth yellow, tiny apples that were more seed than flesh and were produced out of season, and so many others that the Haladin didn’t have the words or ability to describe. Every new fruit was carefully, carefully tested for poison first by smearing a small measure of juice along their lips. Haleth spent more days than not with her mouth stinging and swollen from trying another unsafe potential food source. They hadn’t had to make the choice between poison and starvation yet, but Haleth knew how much food they had on hand at any moment, down to the last kernel of dried corn, and they could not afford to pass anything by. None of the water was safe to drink, either.

All of those specific pitfalls had been planned for. Nan Dungortheb was famously a land of half-shadows where the road would vanish from under your feet if you were arrogant enough to brave travelling in the dark, so they had very cautiously projected out how long it would take to traverse, assuming they’d only be able to make meaningful headway for a few hours a day. They’d spent the tail end of the winter preparing as many water drums and skins as possible to bring Aros’s sweet water along. They’d combed through their burned out and befouled homesteads and fields for every scrap of food the Orcs had overlooked and had zealously guarded against food waste in the relative safety of Estolad. Every member of the Haladin who could hold a sword or a bow had shivered through drills in the frigid winter air. Every single one of them, no matter how young or how old, had practiced walking without a sound.

No, what was worse were the dangers they hadn’t known about at all. Namely sleep. Sleep enveloped them quickly as soon as they laid down their heads and held them all fast in its arms, ensnaring them in dreams that felt more real than their waking nightmare. Not everyone woke up in the mornings. Sometimes, if carried along the road for a while with the rest of the company, they’d eventually recover and claw themselves back out of slumber. Sometimes they didn’t. They’d just sleep—lashed to the back of a horse, head lolling to a side, eyes rolling behind their lids—until a spider got past the Haladin’s defenses or until water couldn’t be poured down their throats or until they just stopped breathing for no obvious reason. It slowed them down. It destroyed morale. It was an impossible foe. But Haleth pressed on anyway with the rest of her people and calculated what they’d do when their water drums ran dry.

In Haleth’s dreams, she mostly saw her family, in vivid, fragmented snatches that bled into each other. She saw her brother weaving baskets in the deft quick way that their mother had mastered. Her father sat on the summery shore of Lake Helevorn and splashed his feet in the water, chasing away all the fish, like Haldar had before he’d learned patience. Her mother’s brow creased with worry as she adjusted her armor across her chest on the way out the door for another sortie against the Orcs.

With time, every single one of their faces had been superimposed across each and every one of the bodies of the Haladin who fell along the way.

Her dream this night began as normal, trapped in the stockade between Ascar and Gelion, clasping at the sodden robe of someone, mouth open wide in fear, who looked like her sister-in-law, and trying to drag her from Gelion’s water. In Nan Dungortheb, large streams swollen with ice melt from the Mountains of Terror would burn unprotected skin and set wounds to festering, and, in the dream, this was also true for the Gelion. Her palms, already rubbed raw, throbbed, but she would not let go.

And then, in the logic of dreams, she wasn’t there any longer. Instead she was in Lord Caranthir’s familiar tent. She’d know it anywhere; she’d spent an unreasonable amount of time there lately, puzzling over his maps and arguing about where he could best send his people to serve hers. The pale orbs that hung from the ceiling and that threw off light without heat were dimmer than she remembered. Shadows multiplied under the furniture, all otherwise arrayed as expected.

She was alone. Strange. There were always guards in this pavilion, both hers and his. His all managed such placid expressions, even in the face of their Lord’s most outrageous losses of temper, that she had to believe they’d been selected for exactly that characteristic. She’d never been here before without Lord Caranthir either.

The largest map of Thargelion, inked by Caranthir’s own hand, was splayed out on the table, surrounded by a multitude of paper weights. She drew closer, her chain mail clinking against itself, and peered over the map. She saw a great unblemished void in the south forest, where her people’s burned out homesteads were located.

The discordant clanging of the entrance fabric being pulled aside startled her. Elves! Who else would think to sew bells into tent flaps? Caranthir strode into the tent, scowling. When he saw her, he smoothed out his facial expression and managed an attempt at a smile.

“Chief Haleth,” he said. “How are you this evening?”

“I’m well. And yourself?” she replied. Her feet hurt. She wanted nothing more than to go back to the Haladin’s temporary resting place and collapse into her bedroll, ringed by the other shieldmaidens. But she’d been selected as the Haladin’s envoy to the Elves, and there was something—

“I am well as well,” he said, and made a bit of a face at himself. “I hope I haven’t kept you waiting too long.”

His normal start to their conversations, but, generally, he’d be placed behind his travel desk or hunched over his maps with the most foreboding glare, voice dripping with sarcasm, indicating that he found her unacceptably late. It did not matter if she had been early. It did not matter if they had no arranged meeting, and she’d decided to come unexpectedly to confront him about wherever new crisis engulfed the Haladin at the hands of Elven indifference. And so, while she’d rarely been late at the start of their partnership, by now, she’d rarely bothered to even mark the time before heading over to his camp. Why not face rudeness with rudeness? Besides, it wasn’t like he was truly busy. If he fully attended to the needs of his lands, then it wouldn’t have taken him a full week to ride out to rescue a stockade that had been under siege for another four.

Except now his face was a serene mask and his tone honied. He could almost pass for one of his guards. He looked rather like an unbearded youth without his customary forehead furrow. Her armor dug into her sides.

“I will endeavor not to take up too much more of your time,” Caranthir said, and then, gracefully, he fell to his knees before her. He fixed his star-bright eyes on her. “Haleth, daughter of Haldad, I have strove to offer recompense over the past months for the deaths of your father, your brother, and all of the others of your House that were lost through my inaction. There are countless, priceless treasures heaped up in my treasury—some carried across the sea from my homeland, and others crafted in this land; fine creations that you cannot even properly imagine—but all you have asked is for me to help you recover the bodies of those lost to the Orcs and to the river. Instead of receiving food stores that could replenish yours eight times over, you have asked me to pick through your befouled homesteads in search of hidden caches of supplies. My debt to you is not yet settled.”

He bowed his head and his long dark hair parted to reveal the nape of his neck. He’d always worn his hair bound up in braids before, suitable for practical wear under a helmet. This wasn’t—

Caranthir worked his signet ring off his finger and then offered it to her in the palm of his hand. His head was still lowered. “I will owe you or your heirs a favor. I swear to help whoever presents me with said ring with whatever aid—”

“No,” Haleth said, backing up against the table, reality asserting itself. The map weights clanked together behind her.

He’d offered her and her people compensation for their losses once. Right after his host had driven off the Orcs—their blood still wet on his sword—he’d addressed her from his horse and offered her things that she didn’t want and didn’t need. If he could not bring her family back to her, then everything else he could provide was worthless. Only the tearstained face of her sister-in-law in the corner of her eye had brought her to her senses enough to ask for aid that wouldn’t incur further debts.

 _This_ conversation hadn’t happened. She had never sought anything like that oath from him.

His head snapped up, and he closed his fist around his ring. “What?”

“No, lord,” she repeated. Her armor had fallen away from her, leaving her in her dull brown travelling clothes; in Nan Dungortheb, the spiders had keener hearing than even the Elves, and she often went unarmored to better stalk them with her bow.

“Isn’t this what you want?” he said, his normal expression asserting itself. “This always works.”

“I don’t know what you mean,” Haleth said. Her sense of the dream became more garbled for a moment; there was the feeling of being in motion again, but she planted her legs as firmly as possible before flickering back to the tent.

“How can you still want more?” he demanded and then shouted several things at the sky in a language Haleth had never heard before, his throat exposed. She’d never been scared of Lord Caranthir previously, but he wasn’t really Caranthir, just a figment of a dream. A dream courtesy of the poisoned vapors of the Valley of Dreadful Death. The only thing that was predictable about it was that it would hurt.

He abruptly got to his feet and ran to the tent flap, wrenching it open with a horrible clanging furor from the bells. Outside was the pale moon and the even paler road of Nan Dungortheb.

He whipped around and continued to yell at her in that unfamiliar language, gesturing with one arm. The jewel from his signet ring placed securely back on his finger caught the light. How could a dream speak to her in a tongue she didn’t know? Was it a vision? She’d never been previously so touched by the hand of fate. Her sleep the night before the Orc host besieged them in the stockade had been deep and untroubled.

She straightened up again. Her bow knocked against her back. When she’d first met him astride his horse, there had been a cut on his brow. In the face of everything that had happened to the Haladin, it had been nothing, but it had been a nothing he’d acquired in service of rescuing them all. She’d directed all of her initial addresses to that wound. Now, that same cut had materialized again on his forehead, along with the rest of the grime of battle, incongruous against his unbound hair. “I don’t understand anything you’re saying,” she said, sure that soon the dream would shift again around her, but if it were an omen, she should try to wring as much meaning from it as possible. “Speak Sindarin.”

Caranthir sneered at her. “Have Thingol’s decrees outlawed even thinking in Quenya, Lord Lórien? Every night you send me dreams to correct my past behavior in accordance with how the Valar view right thoughts and right actions. Am I to forget my native tongue now? Is there no flaw of mine too small to be ironed out? Why won’t you let me leave?”

“I don’t understand that either,” she said. “Who?”

He laughed mirthlessly, the tent flap even now clutched in his hand jingling an accompaniment. She hadn’t realized that she remembered the fine details of his temper so well; there’d been so many other, more important things to attend to at the time. After all, there was little his wrath could do to harm her or her people. If he left, they were more than capable of managing without him. She’d thought little of him once the Haladin had chosen to follow her to Estolad, and so the fact that she’d found his shows of temper more than a little amusing struck her all over again.

“Who?” he repeated, mockingly. “At least tell me if my mistake this time was small. Was my manner too rough? Or are you going to force me through another dozen repeats of this dream again before I find the right item to pay off my debt?”

“I hold you in the clear,” Haleth said, which was true enough. “The Haladin require nothing from you.”

His hair had been gathered up again in braids between one breath and the next. “I know _that_. If Haleth had truly felt anything was owed from me, she’d have petitioned me for it before stupidly marching her people right into a place of last resort without sufficient help. _Nan Dungortheb_.”

Caranthir’s mouth twisted and then the dream did. She was on the back of a rapidly galloping horse, bent over the reins. Trees—proper trees like they had back in Thargelion—surrounded her. She wasn’t alone; Caranthir was riding his bay in front of her, his red cloak appearing almost black in the twilight.

“Look,” he yelled over the wind, flinging his arm to the left. “Orcs.”

She turned her head and saw helmets glinting in the gloom.

All of a sudden, she was awake again, swaddled in her too warm sleeping roll. Quietly, she slithered out of it and went around alerting the rest of the Haladin. First, the guards on watch, so they could don their armor and assist her in waking their sleeping brethren. Fortunately, it didn’t take long. A squadron of Orcs descended on them right as the last of her people were rubbing sleep from their eyes.

None of the Haladin were lost in the resulting skirmish. The Orcs themselves showed clear signs of exhaustion and starvation, and several of their number appeared more disoriented than anything. Perhaps they had gotten lost deep in the shadows of the Mountains of Terror. But the balance of the battle might not have been so skewed if Haleth had not forewarned her people.

In the morning, Haleth picked over the meaning of her dream with the wisemen and wisewomen of the Haladin as they picked their way forward. She’d been reluctant to talk about any of her warped dreams before—none of the Haladin did, once the danger of being caught in slumber forever had become clear; too superstitious of bringing that fate down upon their own heads—but this warranted a thorough discussion. In the end, no other useful warnings could be gathered from it. Nothing so obvious as an imminent attack.

However, from then on, she occasionally dreamed of Caranthir too, not just of her family and of the rest of the dead Haladin, in the same confusing flurry of incoherent moments as the rest of her nightmares in Nan Dungortheb. The few times that she managed to realize she was asleep when he was present, she tried to ask him more about what her first vision had meant. Who was Lord Lórien? What was that language he had used? But those dream Caranthirs always rang false to her ears, hewing closer to the version of him she’d argued with in her head in lieu of arguing with him out loud back in Thargelion, rather than a fully fleshed out person. There was no meaning to be found from him then.

———

They’d run out of stored, safe water five days ago. The road through Nan Dungortheb stretched out in front of them still, longer than even their worst case projections. When the magnitude of the problem became obvious, at a point when it was far too late to turn back east safely, they’d begun to experiment. A few, flawed solutions had been found to stretch their water supplies further, but not enough. Rainwater collected directly into their dry water drums was safe to drink, but it did not rain in the valley particularly often. Some of the mysterious fruits along the road could be juiced, but there weren’t enough of them to slake everybody’s thirst. Water from secret springs could be rendered mostly harmless through distillation, but the fires required attracted numerous spiders to their camp from all directions. The last option also had the lamentable side effect of exhaustion. Insufficient exhaustion to fell someone in the prime of their life, but enough to cause them to stumble more at night and to fall asleep even more deeply.

Haleth exclusively drank spring water, unwilling to subject the rest of the Haladin to a danger she would not also face. It was manageable. In the evenings, fatigue clung to her temples so strongly that she could barely follow her sister-in-law’s conversation over dinner, and she could only be trusted with the early morning watches. She woke for those with tears streaked on her face more often than not, but she could tolerate much worse if it would bring more of the Haladin along with her. It could not be much longer until they were through, until they were in the west.

In her dream that night, she stood for a long time in a golden void, the light so bright that she couldn’t bear to open her eyes. The pain was so overwhelming that she lost her other senses along with it, until, finally, she could make out two male voices faintly singing a duet that was so melodic, so harmoniously pleasing, that it filled her mind and allowed her to slowly look out and appreciate where she was. She found herself near the edge of a grand square. The Haladin had never settled cities, and Estolad—the most dense collection of living beings she had ever personally witnessed—was apparently nothing compared to the great Elven cities in the west. And if those cities were anything like what she was currently imagining, they were right to say so. Ringed around the square were great, white towers, so thin and gracefully wrought that she almost thought they would sway in the breeze like trees. The tallest tower of them all was directly across from her and soared to such great heights that she felt almost dizzy looking at it. The whole plaza was packed with Men—no, she glanced at her nearest neighbor, Elves—all facing towards the singers. She could not make them out, but she began to walk towards them anyway. The crowd of Elves moved around her to accommodate her, but did not otherwise acknowledge her presence.

As she drew closer to the musicians, the clothes and jewelry of the assembled audience became even finer. The Elves on the border of the square had worn gold and silver necklaces and rings that glimmered in the almost overwhelming light, but the ones further in seemed to wear outfits constructed more from jewels than fabric. Most of them wore sharp, strangely angled pins in their hair, set with jewels large enough that sudden head movements might take their neighbor’s eye out. But one of the singers outdid them all. He’d woven those pointy blue and green gem encrusted clasps all through his blond hair, and they seemed to shimmer in time to his harp playing. The other vocalist’s attire was almost plain by contrast, with only one ruby in his dark hair, perfectly matched to the rich maroon of his robes. Something about him seemed very familiar, as if she’d met him once as a child and mostly forgotten him.

The audience at the very front was seated for the concert. In the second row, near the aisle, there was a very small Elf child fidgeting with a bronze toy dog in his lap. She’d only seen such a foreboding expression on one other Elf before.

“You!” Lord Caranthir said, vehemently, and fell out of his chair. He sprawled out on the ground an adult again.

Nobody paid them any mind. The musicians continued their heartbreakingly beautiful duet with the fixed attention of the rest of the crowd.

He stood up, rather like a cat that had misjudged a leap and pretended they always meant to land like that, and walked towards her. “Why are you here?”

“I could ask you that myself,” Haleth replied, immediately on alert for any threats that she’d need to relay back to her people in the morning.

He waved distractedly in the direction of the singers, his gaze intent on her face. “Originally, I got bored in the middle of the second movement and wandered off. It took the search parties several hours to find me again curled up in a storeroom, thoroughly ruining the festival for everyone else. My poor brother refuses to understand that all of the pleasure of his playing is diminished by listening to him endlessly refining his compositions beforehand. Apparently Lord Lórien takes my brother’s side in our quarrel.”

“Who is that?” Haleth began to ask, but the dream grabbed her and tossed her into a new scene with a sick lurch.

She was standing in the same place, in the same square, but it was nearly pitch black. The quality of the darkness pressed down on her like a malevolent hand. Elves were packed even more tightly into the area, most of them carrying torches whose light was sucked into the blackness and illuminated very little. Everyone was shouting, all in that language of Caranthir’s she did not know, but even if she had, she doubted she’d be able to understand anything anyone was saying.

Caranthir stood to her left, clad in bright crimson armor. His usual sword was unsheathed in his hand, and he was staring at a group of seven men standing on the white steps of the tallest tower. The men wore matching armor to his and had all raised their blood red swords together in a salute. One of them—his brother, the singer—jerked his head at Caranthir. Caranthir began to walk towards them to join them.

“Wait!” Haleth cried out. None of her questions had been answered.

He looked back at her, his face blank.

And then the dream squeezed her back out in another vibrantly red tent. She stumbled from the force of it. There was more yelling but from significantly fewer throats. Caranthir’s musician brother was sitting on an elaborately carved chair with a silver crown on his brow, flanked by two men arguing with him. There was an overwhelming familial resemblance between the three of them. How many brothers did Caranthir say he had? She couldn’t recall. Was this dream trying to warn her to be wary of her own family? Or were they in danger somehow? She scarcely had time to attempt to gather her wits before Caranthir, dressed in exactly the same outfit he’d worn to see off the Haladin from Thargelion, reached towards her, and then she was somewhere else again.

From there the dream devolved completely. She’d barely have a second to register where she was in a snowy forest, on the deck of a boat, on the shores of the sea—she’d never seen the ocean before, but she recognized it at once and was whisked away just as quickly—before she was in the next place and the next. She wanted nothing more than to escape, but she could not will herself awake. In some of the locations, Caranthir was there too, but in others, there was not enough time to search him out before she was gone again.

After an entirety, she was back in the painfully bright square, nauseous and with all her bones aching. She felt someone grab at her forearm, much too hard, and squinted her eyes to see Caranthir’s face creased with concern. Had he ever touched her before? She didn’t think so, but then—

If Haldar thought he was going to beat her at target shooting tomorrow, then he had another think coming. Her last three arrows had all been bull-eyes, but past perfection was no guarantee of future performance. Her arms hurt—no, her whole body hurt—but she didn’t want to stop practicing until the last possible second. It wasn’t quite dusk, and the breeze was refreshingly cool and filled with the promise of rain. Soon her mother would call out for her to come in and wash up before dinner, but not yet.

She notched another arrow to her bow and peered down at the target.

“Where are we?” an unfamiliar male voice asked to her left.

Her released arrow went wide. “You aren’t supposed to interrupt someone when they’re shooting,” she said, calmly, and pulled another arrow from her quiver. You also weren’t supposed to aim a bow at anything that you didn’t want to hit, but her father would agree that a stranger on their homestead counted as an acceptable target.

That stranger was instantly recognizable as an Elf. Who else would wear gemstones when it wasn’t even a special occasion?

He didn’t even bother to seem worried about her threat. He always displayed every single one of his emotions so clearly on his face; it was one of his more appealing qualities.

Lowering her bow, she looked up at Caranthir from her full adult height. She still had to crane her neck up, and that, on the other hand, had always been one of his more annoying traits. There was no call for someone to be that tall.

“My home,” she said, in response to his earlier question. She hadn’t let him or any of his Elves accompany her, taking some of the shieldmaidens instead, when it had been time to search through her family’s homestead. Just as well, the inspection had yielded nothing of use. It would have been an unacceptable waste of their time.

Now the unease crept back into his expression. “Haleth, where are you really?”

“Nan Dungortheb,” she replied. And then they were back in its shadowy reaches, cobwebs stuck to his shoulder. The path was faint under her feet, but, nevertheless, she could see it. Not all hope had been lost.

“Still! You should have reached the Brithiach at least a fortnight ago,” he cried and reached out for her again.

She woke gasping and in a panic. Her legs! She couldn’t move her legs! And the light had pierced her throbbing eyes again! It took her much too long to realize that she must not have woken up in the morning and had joined the ranks of the eternal sleepers lashed to the back of a horse.

“How long was I asleep?” she asked little Haldan, marching at her horse’s side.

“Two days,” her nephew replied, his hand wrapped around her ankle as they ambled forward.

From then on, Haleth consented to mix some rainwater in with her measure of distilled spring water.

———

Finally, finally, they’d reached the Sirion. Many of the remaining host of the Haladin openly sobbed at the shores; some of them waded out into the water or prostrated themselves, pressing their foreheads into soft mud. Haleth didn’t have the time to join them, though her whole body thrummed with joy. They’d arrived too late in the day to attempt a safe crossing, but that didn’t mean they could rest on their laurels. Water—water that was safe to drink—and the knowledge that actual game animals were likely lurking in the woods spurred her onwards to divide the Haladin into groups that would guard their campsite, hunt, refill their water stores, and perform all of the little tasks that needed to be done.

When it was time for her to sleep, adrenaline easily carrying her through the first watch, it took her a very long time to quiet her mind enough. That hadn’t been a problem for her the whole time the Haladin had traversed through the Valley of Dreadful Death, and she was glad that her insomnia was back. It meant that they were through. They were reasonably safe.

But her dream, once sleep claimed her, took her back to the stockade in Thargelion. In the grand scheme of her life, the siege hadn’t lasted that long. She shouldn’t be able to recall the way the knots in the bark of the trees hewn together for the barrier wall had formed a pattern near that lone entrance that looked almost like a smiling face. But terror had a way of etching details like that deep into memory.

Caranthir was there, astride his horse, scowling and surrounded by his infuriatingly pleasant guards. There was dried blood on his forehead from his cut. So her mind had cast her back to the very first time they’d met, right before he’d launched into his insultingly pompous speech, offering her what he thought was some great honor.

When he saw her standing before him, he dismounted. “Chief Haleth,” he said and bowed deeply.

She knew him at once. “You don’t have to offer your lands to me again,” she said. “I’m too far west to have any use of them.”

He stood up. The rapid change in elevation opened his wound anew and a small trickle of blood oozed out of the corner.

“Where? If you’ve gone as far as Dorthonion, I would not recommend telling my cousin Angrod that you know me.”

“Tonight, we’re only just at the shores of the Sirion,” she replied. “But I don’t know why you’d think we’d seek out other Elven lords to serve. If we’d wanted that, we’d have stayed in Thargelion.”

Caranthir frowned at her, further aggravating his cut. 

“Stop that,” she said. “Come on.” She turned and went to the Gelion. All of the other figments of her dream that had approximated the host of the Haladin had melted away. The soft cloth she used to clean her sword was in her hand, and she wetted it in the river.

He’d followed her, pressing his fingers against his cut.

“Don’t do that either,” she said, and took his chin in her left hand.

Caranthir lowered himself to his knees so she wouldn’t have to stand on the very tips of her toes to reach and stared at her as she cleaned at his wound. How he felt was written on his face as clearly as anything he’d ever felt around her before, but she did not think about it. It didn’t matter. It was only a dream.

“I wasn’t seeking lordship over the Haladin,” Caranthir said. She felt all the muscles in his jaw stretch out under her palm.

“Were you not?” she asked. “It didn’t matter what your intent was, what mattered was the result. And eventually the Haladin would have lost themselves in the north of Thargelion just as surely as we would have in Estolad.”

She swiped the cloth one last time against his face, before the dream bent under her.

Haleth found herself in a magnificently carved cave. Every place she looked was a new marvel. The walls had a mural made of glowing jewels the likes she’d never seen before, awake or asleep. The pillars lining the sides of the hall were carved to look so much like trees that only the perfection of the leaves revealed them to be reproductions. Even the floor was wondrous, carved like a riot of wildflowers, all initially unrecognizable, but here and there, she saw flowers that she knew from her long journey through Nan Dungortheb. The effect of it all was to make it almost appear like she was standing in a forest during the height of summer.

She was alone. As soon as that thought registered, she noticed three bodies, all wrapped in red cloaks near the empty thrones.

“Do not be unduly alarmed, Lady Haleth, daughter of Haldad,” a mellifluous female voice sounded in her head. “I wanted to see you for myself. My doom is not tied to yours.”

Haleth found herself completely unable to move as some overwhelming pressure slid through her mind. Eventually, she was released, and fell to the ground, gasping.

“Soon, there will be a company of my kinsmen who will find you in the woods. You will not find their terms too onerous. Good luck, Lady Haleth.”

She awoke to dawn’s first rosy light breaking through the mists for the first time in months.  
Her dream was correct. Guarding the Crossings of Teiglin against Orcs and all other foul creatures was nothing in comparison to dominion over all of Brethil.

Haleth had recognized the leader of the group—Lord Finrod Felagund—immediately as the blond musician from her vision of the concert Caranthir had ruined as a child. Nothing about his face had changed with time, so it was very simple. But even if the Eldar had faces that gained lines with age, she would have identified him at once from his fashion sense. Even most Elves wouldn’t wear that many jewels on a single necklace. But still, something about him nagged at her, until their negotiations were almost over.

He had the same chin as Caranthir, she realized. The same straight, thick eyebrows. Afterwards, Haleth crept away from the feast thrown by the Haladin to celebrate their good fortune. And why shouldn’t they? More of them than she’d expected had made it through all of the trials set against them. Brethil was almost unbelievably lovely, and she was sure that the joys of their new home would only deepen and grow with time.

Haleth fell asleep quite early. She didn’t dream.


End file.
